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Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down
littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."
Given the number of times government officials around the world have failed to understand the difference between removing text in a PDF and replacing it with black and just covering the text over with black, they'd probably get it wrong about half the time even with best intentions.
Learn how to operate another program? Spend from the budget for another set of licenses? (the horror)... start to use Open Office or the like?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
And the rest of us say "Get rid of it". We do not access government documents to be blown away by their totally rad page style. We access them for information, and extracting the information from the glumph that encases it is sometimes hard for the best of us.
html all the way. Any formatting you cannot fit in a simple stylsheet can get left out.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I would expect a Microsoft format from our illustrious leaders.
Bingo. Anyone who doesn't see Microsoft's hand in this is hopelessly naive.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I expect they could require that all they wanted, and it still wouldn't happen.
If my usability manuals are to be believed, people have neglected the safeties of nuclear reactors because those things are a chore and do nothing anyway. If you don't want your users to do something, then you design your system so that they never get the option.
So basically they are saying that *because* it is possible to produce a shoddy PDF file which is basically an image dump, that this is reason enough not to use the format?
By this same reckoning, you could produce a really shoddy HTML page which also consists of images and no text... Virtually any format could be misused in this way.
So what's the alternative? That we all revert back to ASCII text since its incapable of holding graphics?
Personally i hate seeing poorly designed websites or pdf files as i described here, where the text is actually an embedded image (or worse - a flash file) and there is no clickable index etc.
We should probably start naming and shaming pdf creation software, and those who use (or misuse) such tools.
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This is not true. PDF is capable of preserving text flow if the document contains such information.
Yes, this can be done, but it is almost universally not done. Of all the pdfs out there, almost all of them that have anything but single column text flow incorrectly. The answer is of course to include this information every time, but I don't see how you can mandate that if the standard doesn't include it and most or all current software creates pdfs that don't have it.
If you have a multi-column layout, then a pdf-to-text algorithm (first step in screen reading) is likely to put column-2-line-1 between column-1-lines-{1 and 2}. Best of luck sorting that out.
In this case it is the pdf-to-text algorithm to be broken, and should be fixed.
I'm not sure that you can always figure out the text flow correctly a posteriori. Once the correct text flow information hasn't been encoded in the document, it's a bit of a crap shoot in some cases to figure out what was intended. Where should that floating box go? Many pdfs have text flow broken up so badly that they appear to read randomly. A few bits from one sentence, then a few words or parts from the middle of another paragraph. Literally the best option for some pdfs is to export them as images and import those to an ocr program.